Services analytics platforms

Overview

The objective of this work is to improve the IT outsourcing and management services that IBM provides by exploiting available data on the configuration, performance, and management of a customer’s IT systems. For example, from analyzing historical data we can determine early indicators for problems that might occur or we can learn what actions in the past have led to problems in order to better manage risks.

Strategic Outsourcing Data Analytics (SODA)

To provide a base platform for all of our services analytics work, we have established a set of stable data sources that can be used as the basis for reporting and developing analytics applications. In some cases it is beneficial to gather data from a range of systems and make it available to authenticated users and applications in a data warehouse.

SODA directly provides enhanced visibility of the underlying systems and their operation through drillable, on-demand reports. Additional business insights are gained from analysis and reporting on key indicators across different domains.

BlueID

The second phase of our work to establish a services analytics platform is focused on linking the data available from various sources. As these sources have been developed for a range of purposes with varying inputs, the same physical system may be identified in multiple ways, for example by an IP address in low-level data or by a name by which the system is managed in higher-level systems. Likewise a customer might be identified in multiple ways, including internal identifiers, which might be different for the customer globally and each geographic operating entity, contract numbers, or even strings with human-readable names.

We are developing BlueID to manage the relationships between this wide range of identifiers so that data from different sources can be linked easily and thus serve as a rich source of analytics applications.